Constant Risk

by Janie Crouch

  Penelope stopped walking for a second. “Wow. That’s pretty firm.”

  “Yes.” But firm wasn’t even the right word. His feelings for Bree were completely unmovable.

  She smiled and started walking again. “Can’t blame a gal for double-checking.”

  They got Jean’s room information and a doctor met them outside the door.

  “How is she doing?” Penelope asked.

  Dr. Yang looked at them with narrowed eyes. “Ms. Adams is doing well, physically. Emotionally, it’s a different story. Are you sure this can’t wait?”

  “Believe me, we don’t want to drag her through these details,” Penelope explained. “And wouldn’t if we had better options.”

  “We’ve got three other women’s lives at stake,” Tanner added. “And we’re on a pretty tight deadline. No physical problems we need to know about? We understood hypothermia could be an issue.”

  “No, the water Jean was submerged in was actually temperature controlled. Lukewarm so as not to affect the body one way or another. She has pretty severe bruising on her wrists and ankles, and we’re keeping her overnight to make sure nothing else pops up we need to be concerned with.”

  “And emotionally?” Penelope asked.

  Dr. Yang tilted his head to the side. “About what you can expect from someone who’s been through what she has. She’s frightened. Angry. Her family is flying in from the East Coast but they haven’t arrived yet. They weren’t even aware she was missing.”

  “We’ll be as brief and sensitive as we can. Tanner was the one who kept her above water until they could get her out of the box, so we’re hoping she’ll remember him a little fondly.” Penelope reached for the door.

  “And believe me,” Tanner said, “we feel like we’ve gone through this with her. We’re definitely sensitive to her suffering.”

  Dr. Yang walked in and introduced Penelope and Tanner.

  Jean stared at Tanner. “I remember you. You were the one who helped keep my head out of the water.”

  Tanner smiled gently. “We’re all very glad we made it in time.”

  Penelope took a step closer. “Jean, we normally would give you much longer to work through some of this before asking questions, but unfortunately you weren’t the only victim. There are some other women, still trapped in situations exactly like yours. We’re trying to do whatever we can to get to them.”

  Jean blanched, visibly shaking. “It’s not that I don’t want to help them, I’m just not sure I know how. I never even saw the guy who took me.”

  Penelope pulled up a picture of Elliot on her tablet. “This is the man who took you. Elliot Webster. Do you recognize him at all?”

  Jean glanced at the picture, then looked away, staring over to the side. Tanner took a step closer. “He’s currently in a holding cell, Jean,” he explained gently. “There’s absolutely no way he can hurt you. Just take a look at him and see if you recognize him from anywhere. That could help lead us in the right direction.”

  She finally glanced back at the tablet. “I—I’m not 100 percent sure, but he looks like a guy who has come by my coffee shop three or four times. Honestly, I never really paid much attention to him.”

  If he was just picking victims based on height and body size, seeing her at work a few times would’ve been all Elliot needed. He’d probably studied her a lot more than she was aware of, but there was no purpose in telling her that.

  “Does that help?” she asked in a small voice.

  Tanner smiled. “Absolutely.”

  Penelope brought up another couple of pictures on the tablet. Of Christina and Betty Neighbors. “Do you happen to recognize either of these women?”

  Jean studied these much more carefully. “No, I’m sorry.”

  “How about these two women?” Penelope showed her a picture of Shelby and Kelly when they were alive.

  “No. Are they the other victims?”

  Penelope shrugged. “They meet the potential criteria. That’s all we know.”

  Jean’s eyes found Tanner. “That’s been driving me crazy. Trying to figure out why he took me. Why he put me in that box. Was it revenge? Was I mean to him? I try not to be rude to people, but maybe I was and I don’t remember.”

  Jean’s voice was becoming louder and more urgent. “Was it because of bad things I did? I cheated on my high school boyfriend. I lied in an interview for a job. Was it karma? Is that why he took me and put me in that box? What were the criteria?”

  Tanner leaned down so he was face-to-face with Jean, stopping her tirade. “Do you want me to tell you what the criteria was? I’m afraid you might be a little bit disappointed, to be honest.”

  “Yes. Please tell me.” Her voice was small.

  “It’s your size, Jean. Nothing more and nothing less than that. Nothing cosmic, no karma or revenge. It’s the fact that you are five foot three and weigh 105 pounds.”

  “What?” Disbelief blanketed her features.

  “He’s telling the truth,” Penelope said. “That’s the common factor among all the victims. They all had to be roughly the same height and weight. Has nothing to do with anything else.”

  “You mean if I let myself put on the twenty pounds I wanted to over the last couple months he might not have chosen me? All I had to do was not work so hard at the gym?”

  Tanner smiled at her. “Let it be a lesson to us all to have seconds of our meals as often as possible.”

  For the first time since they’d walked in, Jean actually smiled. “This helps. I’m still mad as hell and more than a little afraid of everyone I see, but at least knowing it wasn’t something I did makes it all a little more bearable.”

  Tanner smiled back at her. “Good. Because it wasn’t something you did that got you kidnapped, and definitely not anything you can be held accountable for.”

  “I feel like I haven’t helped you at all. Do you have more questions for me?”

  Penelope nodded. “Can you walk us through what happened the day you were kidnapped?”

  Jean took a deep breath. “There’s not a lot I can remember. I was closing the coffee shop with my manager. I decided to run by the bookstore before it closed. I was getting in my car when I felt a prick in my arm. I turned around to figure out what was going on, but everything got dizzy and none of my muscles seemed to work.”

  “Probably Midazolam or ketamine,” Dr. Yang stated. “There weren’t any traces left in her system, but that would be my bet.”

  “When I came to, I was in that box. It took me a while to realize the water was more than just annoying.” Jean swallowed hard. “Eventually I realized the water was going to be what killed me. Then I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

  Jean talking about the water had been what had caused Bree to recognize the pattern, so that was a good thing.

  They asked Jean some more questions, trying to see if she remembered anything that would help them, but the hours had all been a blur for her.

  Tanner looked over at Penelope. Jean might have been able to help them if they were trying to catch Elliot. But if Elliot didn’t know anything about the other suspects, it was doubtful Jean did either. They didn’t want to upset her for no reason.

  Finally, Penelope placed a business card on the table beside the hospital bed. “If you think of anything else, anything that you even get an inkling might be relevant, no matter how small, please call.”

  “Dr. Yang said your family is on their way,” Tanner said. “Will you be okay until they get here?”

  She nodded. “I just want to put all this behind me.”

  Tanner squeezed her hand as he and Penelope got ready to leave. “You will.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Bree had spent the last twelve hours filtering through all Elliot Webster’s online data and was barely making a dent in it. The guy was a digital pack rat.
<
br />   She’d passed the point of exhaustion hours ago. Now she was barely staying a half step above despair. Particularly because the victims, still being broadcasted at the top of every hour, were growing more and more desperate.

  Bree was buried under data. It was so bad she’d even agreed to allowing help. Three of the people who worked under Jeremy were currently digging through Elliot’s information also.

  Bree had gone through all the critical data herself. For example, she’d found where Elliot had created a separate identity and credit card and used it to buy the ketamine he’d used to render Jean unconscious. Hell, she’d even found where he’d worked out the best way to encode and send the transmissions. How he’d arrived at the plan to use the fractal pattern.

  It would all be great if they were trying just to convict Elliot. But it didn’t do them much good in finding the other kidnappers or their victims.

  Going through all this was like trying to find a needle in a haystack of needles. And now she needed to report in to Tanner and Penelope again and let them know she wasn’t even a bit closer to finding anything useful.

  Nobody cast any blame in her direction when she joined the team sitting around the conference room table fifteen minutes later and told them what was happening. But the frustration level was high.

  “Elliot said he met these people online,” Whitaker said.

  Bree rubbed a hand across her face. “I’m sure he did considering he’s been a part of roughly four thousand online conversations and has archived every single conversation in his data storage.”

  Penelope whistled through her teeth. “We need to get you more help to sort this information. Or maybe get you somewhere quieter to work. Or at least some damn headphones with music.”

  Bree shook her head. “No, I don’t like music. I like the bustle of people around me, so I can ignore it. More help would be good, but I’ve already written programs to go through the chat rooms and look for a series of key words. That will be more efficient anyway.”

  “What sort of key words?” Tanner asked.

  “Anything to do with the police, water, drowning. I put in the dimensions of the boxes they built and polyethylene, in case that would trigger something. I put in Jean Adams’s name, Christina’s name, Betty Neighbors’s. I put in fractal code and matrix grid pattern torus.”

  She’d put in every single thing she could think of but so far there had been no results whatsoever.

  She turned to Tanner. “I could’ve missed something. I had to have missed something.” But for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out what it was.

  Those women were going to drown because she couldn’t figure out how to find the necessary data in all Elliot’s virtual junk.

  I don’t think you’re working hard enough, Bethany. Obviously you’re lacking an incentive to do your best work. Maybe this will help you.

  “No, Mr. Jeter. I can do better. Please don’t hurt Mom.”

  Michael Jeter just shook his head and tsked. “Your brain is stronger than this, Bethany. You just don’t want it badly enough. You’re allowing yourself to be unfocused and overwhelmed by superfluous details. I need you to focus.”

  He nodded his head to the man holding her mother. Bethany tried not to vomit at the sickening sound of her mother’s arm being broken, followed immediately by her screams.

  “No!” Twelve-year-old Bethany tried to rush to her mother, but Jeter’s heavy hand on her shoulder wouldn’t let her move. He leaned down and whispered in her ear. “Now, are you ready to concentrate, or do you want to continue to make excuses? I need your best, Bethany. Is your best good enough?”

  She nodded.

  “It’s time to think outside the box. If everything was simple, anyone could do it. The answer isn’t where you expect it.”

  “I’m telling you, she’s done. I’m taking her home.”

  Tanner was crouched beside her holding both of her hands in his, yelling at Penelope and Whitaker as Bree blinked her eyes open.

  What the heck had just happened?

  “Tanner?”

  “Yeah, freckles, I’m here.” He smiled at her before turning to glare back at the people sitting at the conference table. “You need some rest and to get away from all this.”

  She’d been having some sort of flashback. Everyone around the room was staring at her.

  “No. I’m okay.”

  Tanner shook his head. “No, you’re not okay. This is not your job, and pushing yourself this way isn’t healthy.”

  She shook her head, sitting up straighter in the chair. “I can have a breakdown later, then. Right now we need to do whatever we have to do to get these women out.”

  “Bree.” Tanner’s brown eyes were right in front of hers. “We all want to do our best, but there’s one thing that we’ve all had to learn the hard way. Sometimes our best isn’t good enough to save the victims.”

  “But...”

  He trailed a finger down her cheek. “You’re pushing yourself too hard if it’s causing you to black out and have flashbacks.”

  “Tanner’s right, Bree,” Whitaker added. “About all of it. But especially about the fact that we can’t always save the victims. None of us like to talk about it, but it’s always a possibility.”

  She shook her head. “No. My best is good enough. It’s time to think outside the box.”

  As much as she even hated the thought of it, Jeter had been right. He’d been right then and he was right now. Bree was being weak. Not properly motivated.

  These women were going to die if she couldn’t figure this out. Much worse than anything Jeter had ever done to her or her mother.

  The answer isn’t where you expect it.

  But where? Where was it? There was something she was missing. “I haven’t been looking in the right places.”

  “What do you mean?” Penelope asked.

  “These guys met online, so we’ve been focusing our search in clubs, classes, chat rooms from the last two years. They would’ve had to communicate regularly.”

  Tanner stood beside her. “Yes, that’s true.”

  “I’ve written half a dozen programs to look for key terms in any of those places. The people helping me have looked over it themselves. But we haven’t found anything. He just left us with so much information. It feels like it’s impossible to wade through it all.”

  “That probably means something is there,” Tanner said.

  She nodded. “You’re right. And it’s smart of him. It’s the best sort of camouflage he could’ve picked. He’s got hundreds of chat rooms about codes, engineering, patterns... And we haven’t found anything there.”

  Penelope let out a sigh. “Maybe we need to talk to Elliot again. We won’t get much because of the lawyer, but maybe I can bring the DA in on this super quick. See if we can strike a deal if Elliot is willing to talk right now.”

  Tanner shook his head. “That’s not going to be an easy process even if you have the DA on speed dial.”

  “It’s like that little bastard said. It’s a chess game,” Whitaker said. “But we don’t even have all the pieces.”

  Something clicked in Bree’s mind. “Elliot said it was like a chess game? Specifically that?”

  Tanner nodded. “Yeah. He mentioned chess when we were talking to him. Why?”

  “Of course,” she muttered. Elliot was smart. It made sense.

  “What?” the other people in the room all asked at the same time.

  “There’s a chat room from his middle school chess club. I wanted to kill Elliot when I saw it. Why would anyone keep a chat room from a middle school chess club? We did a preliminary search of it, then immediately filed it as nonessential.”

  She turned to Tanner. “I have to go.” It was time to think outside the box.

  * * *

  THE MIDDLE SCHOOL chess club chat roo
m was the key.

  It took Bree a few minutes to determine their code words and what they meant, but once she established that baseline, everything about the kidnapping plans was broken open.

  “This is definitely it,” she said.

  Everyone was huddled around her workstation in a way that would have normally driven her crazy. It drove her a little crazy now, but she forced herself to ignore it. They all just wanted to finally hear some good news.

  Bree was happy to be able to give it to them. When she knew what she was looking for, it wasn’t difficult to find everything they had planned. They had discussed—using coded terms to make it seem like their discussion was about chess—the particulars about everything from the sizes of the boxes to the dimensions of the rooms where they would be held. The physics behind exactly how long it would take to fill the water coffins had been discussed at length.

  “Damn,” Whitaker muttered. “That’s more details than Noah had building the ark.”

  Bree nodded. “Yes, their plans had to be exact. Otherwise we would’ve noticed right away that the boxes or the water levels were different. They know exactly when the victims will drown.”

  And it was six and a half hours from now.

  “Get it on a timer,” Penelope said. “That’s our countdown clock. I’m going to trust their math.”

  Bree agreed. They hadn’t left anything to chance.

  There was some talk about victims, but not enough detail to give them positive IDs. That was disappointing for everyone.

  But there was good news. The perps had all been checking in to the chat room regularly. They were starting to wonder where Elliot, or Number 3 as they called him, was, but no one was worried enough to panic yet.

  “All we need is for one of them to hop in one more time,” Bree said. “Once they do, I’ll be able to decipher their location pretty quickly. I should also be able to clone their username and try to draw the others into coming online so that we can trace them too.”

  She felt Tanner’s kiss at the top of her head. “We’ll be ready.”